Suramya's BlogWelcome to my crazy life...2016-09-27T19:32:07Zhttp://www.suramya.com/blog/feed/atom/WordPressSuramyahttp://www.suramya.comhttp://www.suramya.com/blog/?p=26322016-09-27T19:32:07Z2016-09-27T18:13:06ZI know I am supposed to blog about the all the trips I took but wanted to get this down before I forget what I did to get the install working. I will post about the trips soon. I promise

Installing an alternate firmware on my router is something I have been meaning to do for a few years now but never really had the incentive to investigate in detail as the default firmware worked fine for the most part and I didn’t really miss any of the special features I would have gotten with the new firmware.

Yesterday my router decided to start acting funny, basically every time I started transferring large files from my phone to the desktop via sFTP over wifi the entire router would crash after about a min or so. This is something that hasn’t happened before and I have transferred gigs of data so I was stumped. Luckily I had a spare router lying around thanks to dad who forced me to carry it to Bangalore during my last visit. So I swapped the old router with the new one and got my work done. This gave me an opportunity as I had a spare router sitting on my desk and some time to kill so I decided to install a custom firmware on it to play with it.

I was initially planning on installing dd-wrt on it but their site was refusing to let me download the file for the RT-N53 model even though the wiki said that I should be able to install it. A quick web search suggested that folks have had a good experience with the Tomato by Shibby firmware so I downloaded and installed it by following these steps:

Download the firmware file

First we need to download the firmware file from the Tomato Download site.

Extract the ZIP file. The file we are interested in is under the ‘image’ folder with a .trx extension

Restart the Router in Maintenance mode

Turn off power to router

Turn the power back on while holding down the reset button

Keep holding reset until the power light starts flashing which will mean router is in recovery mode

Set a Static IP on the Ethernet adapter of your computer

For some reason, you need to set the IP address of the computer you are using to a static IP of 192.168.1.2 with subnet 255.255.255.0 and gateway 192.168.1.1. If you skip this step then the firmware upload fails with an integrity check error.

Upload the new firmware

Connect the router to a computer using a LAN cable

Visit 192.168.1.1

Login as admin/admin

Click Advanced Setting from the navigation menu at the left side of your screen.

Under the Administration menu, click Firmware Upgrade.

In the New Firmware File field, click Browse to locate the new firmware file that you downloaded in the previous step

Click Upload. The uploading process takes about 5 minutes.

Then unplug the router, wait 30 seconds.

Hold down the WPS button while plugging it back in.

Wait 30 seconds and release the WPS button.

Now you should be using the new firmware.

Browse to 192.168.1.1

Login as admin/password (if that doesn’t work try admin/admin)

Click on the ‘reset nvram to defaults’ link in the page that comes up. (I had to do this before the system started working but apparently its not always required.)

Configure your new firmware

That’s it, you have a router with a working Tomato install. Go ahead and configure it as per your requirements. All functionality seems to be working for me except the 5GHz network which seems to have disappeared. I will play around with the settings a bit more to see if I can get it to work but as I hardly ever connected to the 5GHz network its not a big deal for me.

References

The following sites and posts helped me complete the install successfully. Without them I would have spent way longer getting things to work:

]]>0Suramyahttp://www.suramya.comhttp://www.suramya.com/blog/?p=26282016-05-01T21:48:19Z2016-05-01T21:48:19ZHow do you summarize a 10 day trip to an island paradise with incredibly hospitable folks that you took with a group of awesome friends? This has been the question that has been annoying me over the past few weeks since I have gotten back from my trip and as you can guess by the lack of posts before this one I haven’t really found a good answer to it yet. However a month is more than enough time to ponder and I realized that because I was avoiding posting anything about the trip I was also not posting anything else on the blog either because that summary had to come first. So without any further ado here we go.

We flew from Bangalore to Colombo via Chennai. If you are ever planning on going to Sri Lanka take a direct flight, the Chennai airport is the worst airport I have had the ‘pleasure’ of flying out of. The duty free shopping area is 2 shops with minimal goods and the ‘food court’ is one shop that didn’t have have the items on its menu available. (this was at about 10pm or so). We got to Sri Lanka at ~2am and took a cab to our B&B which was decent, not great but decent. From there our grand adventure started the next day. We got lucky and got a great driver (Sujeet) who was excellent in guiding us and making sure we had a good time.

The first day we mostly traveled and didn’t really do much but starting the second day the fun started. We did a whole bunch of water sports (Jetski, water-skiing, Banana boat, River cruise etc) and we visited a turtle farm where we saw turtles aging from a few days to one over 150 years old. We also did a river safari where I tried out a fish spa for the first time. It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting and for the cost it was worth it.

The third day started off with me going for Scuba diving and the rest of the folks went snorkeling. Managed to do two back to back dives, one was to a sunken ship and the other was in coral. Got to see some really colorful fishes but nothing too spectacular. Unfortunately the underwater camera at the dive shop was broken so didn’t get any underwater pictures but the memories are certainly great. After we got done with the diving we drove down to Galle and saw the famous clock tower and fort. The tower wasn’t very impressive and was under repair. There was also a nice beach and some colorful nick-knacks to pick up. (Though we ended up not guying anything). The fort was nice and it was obvious that it would have been very impressive during its peak.

On the fourth day we decided to go whale watching and that meant waking up at 5 so that we were there at the port by 7am. The trip was nice but extremely hot and since we were on the deck with no shade all of us got tanned (and slightly burnt) by the time we got back. Unfortunately we didn’t see any whales but we did see a whole lot of dolphins as they were pretty much constantly following our boat. The fact that we didn’t see a whale was disappointing but later in the evening we visited an ancient stupa and prepared for an early morning the next day so that we could go on a leopard safari.

The fifth day started off really early again (before dawn) and though we saw a lot of birds we didn’t see any leopards. This and the fact that we didn’t see any whales earlier made us decide to avoid any further safaris in the trip and focus on other kinds of sightseeing. So on the next day we visited a couple of ancient temples, stupas etc and on the 7th day we went river rafting. The rapids were grade 3&4 for the most part but it was a lot of fun esp the part where we got into the water and swam around.

On the 8th day we visited Sigiriya which is a world heritage site and saw the amazing construction and palaces that had been built so long ago. It was impressive and humbling to see what people were capable of constructing with pure muscle power without any of the modern technology to assist them. If you visit, make sure you request a guide because otherwise you will miss out on a lot of the background information and things you def must see.

The last day was spent relaxing at the Colombo beach after spending some time shopping and seeing the local sites. It was with a heavy heart, amazing memories and a lighter wallet (not that much lighter since things were not as expensive as we thought) we boarded our flight back. I wish we had more time there because we weren’t able to cover any of the northern or eastern part of the country but that gives us an excuse to plan another trip so lets see how that works out.

I have uploaded the photos to Facebook so you can check them out over there.

Well, this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

]]>0Suramyahttp://www.suramya.comhttp://www.suramya.com/blog/?p=26172016-02-25T13:16:12Z2016-02-25T14:30:47ZAs you know software patents are something of a scourge in the computer industry and are hated for the most part (except by the companies using them to make money/stifle innovation and competition). There is extensive debate on the topic all of which boils down to the following three questions:

Should software patents even be allowed? If they are then how do we define the boundary between patentable and non-patentable software?

Is the inventive step and non-obviousness requirement is applied too loosely to software?

The Indian patent office has ruled on 19th Feb 2016 that software patents discourage innovation by using the following three part test to determine the patentability of Computer Related Inventions (CRIs), which precludes software from being patented:

Openly construe the claim and identify the actual contribution;

If the contribution lies only in mathematical method, business method or algorithm, deny the claim;

If the contribution lies in the field of computer programme, check whether it is claimed in conjunction with a novel hardware and proceed to other steps to determine patentability with respect to the invention.. The computer programme in itself is never patentable. If the contribution lies solely in the computer programme, deny the claim. If the contribution lies in both the computer programme as well as hardware, proceed to other steps of patentability.

This is a great step in ensuring that useless/basic idea’s don’t get patented and stifle innovation.

]]>0Suramyahttp://www.suramya.comhttp://www.suramya.com/blog/?p=26002016-02-19T20:46:22Z2016-02-19T20:46:22ZWe have heard multiple stories where someone looses a pendrive or a laptop containing sensitive/private data which is then published by the person who found the drive embarrassing the owner of the data. The best way to prevent something like that from happening to you if you loose a disk is to make sure all your data is encrypted. Historically this used to be quite painful to setup and required a lost of technical know-how. Thankfully this is no longer the case. After trying a bunch of different options I found Linux Unified Key Setup-on-disk-format (LUKS) to be the most user-friendly and easy to setup option for me.

Setting it up is quite easy by following the instructions over at www.cyberciti.biz. However since things on the internet have a tendency of disappearing on a fairly frequent basis, I am using this post to save a paraphrased version of the installation instructions (along with my notes/comments) just in case the original site goes down and I need to reinstall. All credit goes to original author. So without further ado here we go:

Install cryptsetup

First we need to install cryptsetup utility which contains all the utilities we need to encrypt our drive. To install it in Debian/Ubuntu you just issue the following command as root:

apt-get install cryptsetup

Configure LUKS partition

Warning: This will remove all data on the partition that you are encrypting. So make sure you have a working backup before proceeding amd don’t blame me if you manage to destroy your data/device.

Run the following command as root to start the encryption process:

cryptsetup -y -v luksFormat <device>

where <device> is the partition we want to encrypt (e.g. /dev/sda1). The command will ask you for confirmation and a passphrase. This passphrase is not recoverable so make sure you don’t forget it.

Create drive mapping

Once the previous command completes you need to create a mapping of the encrypted drive by issuing the following command:

cryptsetup luksOpen <device> backup2

You can also map a partition to using its UUID (which is what I do) by issuing the following command instead (This works great if you want to script automated backups to an external drive):

cryptsetup luksOpen UUID=88848060-fab7-4e9e-bac2-f9a2323c7c29 backup2

Replace the UUID in the example with the UUID of your drive. (Instructions on how to find the UUID are available here).

Use the following command to see the status for the mapping and to check if the command succeeded:

cryptsetup -v status backup2

Format LUKS partition

Now that we have created the mapping we need to write zeroes to the encrypted device, to ensure that the outside world sees this as random data and protects the system against disclosure of usage by issuing the following command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mapper/backup2

Since this command can take a long time to complete depending on the drive size and dd by default doesn’t give any feedback on the percentage completed/remaining I recommend that you use the pv command to monitor the progress by issuing the following command instead:

pv -tpreb /dev/zero | dd of=/dev/mapper/backup2 bs=128M

This will take a while to run so you can go for a walk or read a book while it runs. Once the command completes you can create a filesystem on the device (I prefer to use ext4 but you can use any filesystem you like) by formatting the device:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/backup2

After the filesystem is created you can mount and use the partition as usual by issuing the following command:

mount /dev/mapper/backup2 /mnt/backup

That’s it. You now have an encrypted partition that shows up as a regular partition in Linux which you can use as a regular drive without having to worry about anything. No special changes are needed to use this partition which means any software can use it without requiring changes.

How to unmount and secure the data

After you are done transferring data to/from the drive you can unmount and secure the partition by issuing the following commands as root:

umount /mnt/backup

followed by

cryptsetup luksClose backup2

Creating a backup of the LUKS headers

Before you start anything else, you should create a backup copy of the LUKS header because if this header gets corrupted somehow then all data in the encrypted partition is lost forever with no way to recover it. From the cryptsetup man page:

“LUKS header: If the header of a LUKS volume gets damaged, all data is permanently lost unless you have a header-backup. If a key-slot is damaged, it can only be restored from a header-backup or if another active key-slot with known passphrase is undamaged. Damaging the LUKS header is something people manage to do with surprising frequency. This risk is the result of a trade-off between security and safety, as LUKS is designed for fast and secure wiping by just overwriting header and key-slot area.”

Create a backup by issuing the following command:

cryptsetup luksHeaderBackup <device> --header-backup-file <file>

Important note: a LUKS header backup can grant access to most or all data, therefore you need to make sure that nobody has access to it.

In case of disaster where our LUKS header gets broken, we can restore it by issuing the following command:

Please note that data encrypted by LUKS is quite obvious with most Linux systems identifying it as an encrypted partition automatically. So if someone examines your system they will know you have encrypted data and can force you to divulge the password by various means (including the use of Rubber-hose Cryptanalysis. )

If you want the encrypted partition to be hidden then you can use Deniable encryption/Hidden Partition or use steganography. I haven’t really used either so can’t comment on how to set it up correctly but maybe I can talk about it in a future post after I explore them a bit more.

Well this is all for now, hope you find this useful. Will write more later.

– Suramya

]]>0Suramyahttp://www.suramya.comhttp://www.suramya.com/blog/?p=25742016-02-01T17:48:29Z2016-02-01T17:24:35ZAfter the KP trek I wanted to relax so last weekend I went for a day trip to Hogenakkal Falls with friends and this weekend I did absolutely nothing and it was glorious This post was supposed to have been published last week but first I was waiting for the pics to be uploaded and then got busy with work so didn’t get a chance to finish the post before today. But better later than never so here we go.

We (14 of us) left Bangalore at ~7am which was quite good considering certain folks (and I am not going to name names) were running quite late and made me wait outside my house for almost 45 mins. We had hired a 13 seater Tempo Traveller for the trip and the guy made pretty good time. Coincidentally it was Shammi’s birthday so when we stopped for breakfast we cut the cake and created enough of a racket disturbing everyone else in the restaurant that the owner asked us to move to a private room so that we didn’t scare the rest of his customers away.

The Mandatory cake facial

After finishing food we were on our way and spent the next 3 hours fooling around. Played a whole lot of dumb-charades , took selfies and basically drove the driver nuts. The way was quite scenic and traffic wasn’t too bad but even if that wasn’t the case the company was fun enough to make the trip enjoyable. This time most of the folks who came for the trip were people who we knew so there were no unpleasant surprises like last time.

Everyone Smile

Once we got to the falls we found that the only place where you were allowed to go into the water was this one place that didn’t look very clean and there was a very long queue so we all decided to skip that and go directly for the boat ride in the coracles (Bamboo Boats) with the idea that we would get into the water in a cleaner less crowded area. As there were 14 of us and each boat could only take 4 people at a time we rented 4 boats and were off. The boat ride was a two part affair where we boated to an Island sort of place and then had to walk across to get to the other side while the boatman carried the boats across then we got back in the water and spent a good 2 hours (maybe more) in the water. Not sure of the exact time we spent in the water as I had to take my watch off and put it in the bag along with the phone to prevent it from getting soaked. Though having things in the bag didn’t really help much because my spare set of clothes were completely wet by the time we finished, thankfully the phone and the watch escaped this fate and were reasonably dry.

Us in the boat

Some of the small falls we saw during the boat ride

Due to some restrictions we were not allowed to get in the water during the boat ride but thanks to some negotiations we were allowed to get in the water in a secluded area with a small waterfall and it was great. We spent almost an hour in the water over there and had to be forced out of the water.

After the boat ride finished we had a late lunch (really late ’cause it was around 4pm) at Hotel Tamil Nadu. The food was decent and quite tasty (though that could be because we were starving so all food would have tasted good by this time). After lunch we fooled around a bit outside the restaurant ’cause no one was in the mood to head back.

Lets climb a tree like our ancestors used to…

Group Pic outside the Tamil Nadu Restaurant

How can we have a birthday celebration without Birthday Bumps?

On the way back we had a pit stop on the way to watch the sunset and it was gorgeous. Took a whole bunch of pics and then we were on our way again. After a bit folks decided the best way to pass the time was to dance in the bus. I am surprised that the driver didn’t get into an accident considering the amount of racket we made and how distracting it must have been to have 14 people dancing/screaming behind him for almost 3 hours. Unfortunately none of the photos I took of the dancing came out clean, but still the memories are crystal clear. We stopped for dinner at a roadside bar/restaurant but it looked very shady so we decided to get the food packed and ate our dinner in the bus itself which was an experience in itself.

Sunset on the way back from Hogenakkal Falls

Group pic at the sunset point

Finally we reached Bangalore around 10pm (maybe a bit earlier) and then all of us went our different ways with great memories and a plan to do similar trips again in the near future.

Well this is all for now, will write more later.

– Suramya

]]>2Suramyahttp://www.suramya.comhttp://www.suramya.com/blog/?p=25382016-01-20T07:34:00Z2016-01-19T16:33:07ZThis past weekend I decided to go to Kumara Parvatha for a two day Trek instead of spending it lazing about at home and even though my legs have gone on strike and refuse to work after the trip it was an amazing experience. The trip was organized by Shirky as part of the Bangalore Entertainment meetup group. This is the third trip I have done with him as part of the meetup (the others were to Gokarna and Mangalore for beach parties) and as always it was great fun.

Kumara parvatha is supposed to be the most difficult trek in Karnataka’s and comes to about 30km of trekking. The one advise I have for anyone attempting this trek is that this is not a trek for beginners, do not expect any amenities. It is hard and you need to be the kind of person who appreciates natural beauty to appreciate it. If you haven’t trekked before it is very easy to feel demotivated and put off from the entire concept of Trekking. Basically don’t expect Changing room, rest room, bedroom, shower, porters etc on this trek. Unfortunately there were some folks in the group who didn’t do their research and for some reason decided to come for the trek without any preparation or research on what to expect. For the most part everyone took it in stride and chalked it up to a good learning experience, however there were some folks (and I am not going to name names as that is not the point of this post) who decided to blame everyone except themselves for their lack of preparation which caused some issues later in the trek and post completion.

We started the Trek with 21 people from Bangalore via KSRTC bus and from the start itself the trip was quite eventful. We had our first casualty (one of the girls fell and hurt her knee) even before we boarded the bus and one of the guys lost his phone. When we called the number the person who found the phone picked up our call and asked for the pin to unlock the phone, when we refused for obvious reasons he told us that he had no intention of returning the phone. Thankfully it wasn’t an expensive phone but still, it was disappointing.

Group photo at the beginning of the Trek

We got to Kukke Subramanya at ~5am after an uneventful drive and freshened up over there before starting the trek at ~8am. The morning was brisk but within a few mins of walking I was dripping in sweat and ready for a halt :). We managed to walk for a whole 10 mins before we took our first halt which set the trend for the rest of the trek.

We made it to Battara mane by ~11am. This was after we stopped quite frequently for rest and spent a good 20 mins or so at a stream we found mid-way to recover. Battara mane which translates to Battara’s house is ~7kms from the beginning of the trek and is the midpoint of the route. For the most part the trail was in the forest so the sun wasn’t a big problem but the last kilometer or so was in grassland so it was burning hot and exhausting.

Refreshing halt at a mountain stream on route to Battara mane

Initially we had planned to continue to KP after a brief rest and food but we were told that camping on KP is banned due to a recent forest fire caused by Trekkers. So we decided to camp at the Forest department’s camping site about half a kilometer from Battara’s house. Which honestly speaking was a great stroke of luck because I don’t think a lot of the group would have made it that far and considering the amount of fuss that was raised about the conditions over here I shudder to think how folks would have reacted when they were told that there are not bathrooms/food areas at KP.

We had lunch at Battara’s and that was one of the more disappointing parts of the trek as the food was not that great. I had read online that it was very simple south Indian food but that doesn’t cover it. The food was bad. You pay 100 Rs for Rice and Sambhar which was more like Rice and Rasam because I didn’t really see any vegetables in it. Oh and you also got pickle :). The food is self service with no utensils like spoons provided so you get to eat with you hand. I saw a bunch of foreigners trying their hand at it and they enjoyed it. However if you are able to you should carry your own food as you can’t really have the food provided multiple times. We got to enjoy it 3 times and that was more than enough. For dinner you should ensure you are there early because at times you can have a shortage of plates and have to wait. In our group folks made do with 6-8 people eating from a single plate and it was hilarious.

After lunch we rested for a bit and then walked over to the Forest departments camp site where we proceeded to try putting up our tents. Interestingly only two of us had ever set up a tent before and it took a group effort with 10-12 people helping over an hour and half to get the first one setup. A few folks figured it was more important to sleep than help us setup the tents but in the end I think we were better off with them not helping. Though I did hear a few complaints from those folks later in the evening about how disorganized the event was and how no one knew how to setup tents etc.

Relaxing after finally managing to setup the tents

After the tents were finally up we checked out the nearby View point and got some amazing pics (see below). This time I spent a lot less time taking photos & more time enjoying the view and the company. I will share more photos once I receive them from the folks brave enough to carry a DSLR on the trek. Once it got dark we started a campfire and played a few rounds of antakshari with a couple of interruptions by cattle who wanted to stop by to say hello and try to eat any food items left unattended. By 10 we were ready to crash. Some of the folks felt that the view of the night sky was awesome enough that they decided to sleep outside. This turned out to be an eventful decision as they were woken up by cows a few times when the cows tried to eat their hair.

View from the sunset view point

Group photo at the sunset view point

Sunset

We woke up at 4:30am the next day as we wanted to start the next stage of the trek by 5:30am. Taking down the tents in absolute dark using flashlight was an interesting experience but with the help of most of the people we got it done fairly quickly and were ready to start on the remaining part of the trek. At this time 8 people decided that they did not have the capacity to complete the trek and wanted out. So they declined to continue and went back down the trail. Unfortunately they also declined to carry their sleeping bags/tent back down so we had no option but to carry them down ourselves.

We stored our tents/equipment etc at the forest department and started the trek with just food and water. Unfortunately by the time we got to Kallumantapa three of us out of the 13 remaining were not feeling well enough to continue so with a disappointed heart we came back down leaving the last 10 members of the group to finish the trek.

The valley covered in mist at ~7am

Breakfast at Kallumantapa

After we got back I slept for a bit waiting for the remainder of the group to get back while the other two went ahead down the trail to try to catch an earlier bus back. Once the remainder of our got back from conquering the peak and recovered we had lunch and started back. At this time since the earlier folks had not taken any of their sleeping bags etc with them we were left with 11 people to carry 15 sleeping bags, 6 tents and all our personal bags. Obviously this was quite painful and by the time we got down my knees were on strike and it took us long enough that we finished the last 30 mins of the trek in the dark using flashlights.

Once we got out from the trail we dragged ourselves to the lodge and got a room to freshen up post which I was feeling human enough to get dinner which was finally something other than rice and sambhar. At 9:30pm we boarded our bus back and reached Bangalore at 4:30am. At which time we found out that due to the last min confusion on who was carrying what we managed to loose one of the tents. Which was a brief downer but still, stuff happens in trips so it wasn’t too bad. Got home at 5:30 and crashed like a log.

Even though I didn’t get to finish the trek it felt great pushing my limits and I am def planning on doing this again in the near future so that I can say that I completed KP.

Well, this is all for now. Will write more later.

– Suramya

]]>0Suramyahttp://www.suramya.comhttp://www.suramya.com/blog/?p=25282016-01-11T19:31:19Z2016-01-11T19:31:19ZI was watching Felicia Day’s Flog earlier today and in it one of the sites she talks about is Personality Insights. This site claims to be able to help you gain insight into how and why people think, act, and feel the way they do by applying linguistic analytics and personality theory to their writings.

Which is about a 50% accurate as I normally don’t reply on/use social media that much. Though I do prefer to be eco-friendly when possible so that part can be taken as accurate.

I am unlikely to:

Buy healthy foods

Use a coupon

Click on an ad

All of which are mostly true. I don’t normally click on ad’s, unless I manage to do it accidentally. I use an ad blocker and try to filter out as many of the annoying ads as I can. Using a coupon requires way too much effort so I tend not to do so unless its relatively simple and doesn’t require too much effort. As for healthy foods, most of the time they are absolutely tasteless so I avoid them for the most part.

Other than that, the site thinks I am an extrovert (not really), assertive (which is kind of true) and my ‘ choices are driven by a desire for connectedness.’ Not sure what that means exactly but sounds really deep and inspiring.

This one is only about 33% accurate as I have been known to change careers quite often before I joined GS. I def don’t click on ads and rarely follow folks on social media. To give you an idea I started using twitter mid 2015.

I am unlikely to:

Buy eco-friendly

Reply on social media

Spend on health and fitness

This is about 60% accurate, I prefer to buy eco-friendly but rarely reply on social media and hardly ever spend on health and fitness. Other than that the site thinks I am unconventional and shrewd (first time I have had someone tell me that) who is unconcerned with art (which is true, I find most of the so called art boring and silly. Don’t even get me started on ‘modern art’ ) and chooses based on a desire of efficiency (which is true, I like to think that I am efficient)

Results from the second text sample

In all this was an interesting read and though parts of it made me laugh it does give you a glimpse of what might be coming in the near future when computers will be able to diagnose your personality and figure out your mood based on your behavior and writings.

Well this is all for now, will write more later.

– Suramya

]]>0Suramyahttp://www.suramya.comhttp://www.suramya.com/blog/?p=25212016-01-08T15:39:53Z2016-01-08T15:39:52ZWishing all the readers of this blog a very Happy new Year. 2015 passed really quickly in some aspects and was slow as molasses in others. Which is to say that the year had both pluses and negative points (as usual). Some of the pluses:

I have a adorable new niece [pic below]

I got to Travel to some interesting places with interesting people

Work is fun as usual, moved to a new team with new responsibilities and more technical role.

Made new friends

Attended live concerts by some of my all time favorite singers (AR Rehman, Usha Uthup)

There were a few downsides as well but don’t feel like dwelling on them so… In any case its a new year so time for New Year resolutions. Actually now that I think about it this is the first time I am making a formal resolution, usually I just decide and then wing it. But change is good and once I have it out in the open it will force me to follow through so without further ado here we go:

Last few years have been slow on the writing side for me, both on the Blog and on the Articles front. This year I am going to make an active effort to make a blog post every week (more frequently if possible) and at least one article every quarter.

Travel more. This is something I started implementing in the tail end of 2015 but will continue to do more in 2016. This will include both domestic and international travel.

Actually do something productive with the Raspberry Pi instead of using it as a glorified paperweight.

Well this is all for now. Will write more later.

– Suramya

My Niece

]]>0Suramyahttp://www.suramya.comhttp://www.suramya.com/blog/?p=25072015-10-11T16:49:25Z2015-10-11T16:49:25ZSome of you might have wondered (for a very brief amount of time) based on my last post and then lack of activity if I had managed to get myself sent to Mars but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. The problem was more mundane, basically I had somehow managed to get my desktop in a state WHERE it thought that it needed to uninstall KDE whenever I tried to upgrade to the latest Debian packages using ‘apt-get upgrade’ or for that matter when I tried to install any new package as well. After ignoring the issue for a while I decided to take the plunge and went ahead with the upgrade thinking that I would just reinstall KDE after the upgrade completed. Unfortunately that didn’t work out as planned and I had to do a full reinstall from scratch. It was something I thought about doing so that I could resize the partition allocation but didn’t have the time/incentive to do it. So this was the perfect time to take the plunge.

I re-partitioned the drive and started the install. The first few attempts failed quite spectacularly because apparently some of the packages in the ‘Unstable’ branch are broken (which is not unexpected because after all it *is* called the unstable branch.) After I switched to the Testing branch which is more stable than unstable I got a bit further along but hit another snag while installing KDE as during the upgrade systemd kept complaining about not being able to talk to policykit and died after giving the following error message a few hundred times:

This stumped me for a while since I didn’t have the energy at the time to research the issue in too much detail. I would have resolved it faster but as I had my laptop working I was able to get work done and access the net, (even if it wasn’t the most comfortable way to work.) which reduced the urgency to fix the problem. After a few weeks I finally got time to sit and work on the issue. Turns out the problem was caused because systemd was expecting a later version of policykit than what was installed and apt-get wasn’t upgrading policykit before it started installing KDE. The solution was quite simple after I figured out what the problem was, which was to upgrade policykit by issuing the following command as root before installing KDE:

apt-get install policykit-1

After running that command I was able to upgrade to the latest Debian Testing and with that I also got a newer version of KDE (5:90 is what apt-get calls it) which is nice and has a lot of eye candy. However as with all KDE releases/upgrades to a new system (Plasma) it still has issues/missing features. Annoying stuff that I have found so far is listed below:

There is no quick icon widget. I put all the software I regularly use in the Quick icon bar and not having it is really annoying. There is a temp workaround where I can right click on a window and select ‘Show as a Launcher when not running’ but it is not the same.

There is a bug that prevents you from disabling the beep for system events for all events. So everytime I try to delete sometime I get a loud and annoying beep. I can’t switch off all sounds because then I can’t hear my music either. Lots of folks have been complaining about this so hopefully there will be a fix out soon.

Not all software minimizes to the system tray. Specifically, Tomboy which I use to take notes exits completely when I close it instead of minimizing to the system tray which is what it used to do. I am sure there is a setting that I am missing but I haven’t found the fix yet.

There are other minor annoyances but they are mostly caused because the new version does things slightly differently so I guess I just need to get used to the new way. To top things off my UPS battery has gone for a toss and I get an amazing 0.2 mins of backup with a full charge. I have ordered new batteries but till they arrive I need to remember to power off the system when I am not around.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later (hopefully more regularly now that I have a working desktop again).

– Suramya

]]>0Suramyahttp://www.suramya.comhttp://www.suramya.com/blog/?p=24992015-09-07T18:38:56Z2015-09-07T18:20:04ZNASA has this thing where you can register to send your name to Mars on their InSight lander. Since it is free and seemed like an interesting idea I registered and got my very own boarding pass. So what does it actually mean? Basically my name will be etched on a micro-chip and blasted to Mars on the lander. Pretty cool right? (Just for my name though but still it is cool.Hopefully there will be actual flights to Mars in my lifetime.)

My Boarding pass

If you want to have your name sent then you have till tomorrow to register. You can do so here. More details on the process and the lander are at the NASA page, check it out if you have some time.